everybody hurts

Correlation, or causality? Within, as far as I can tell, roughly a 30 hour period: R.E.M. announces that they are breaking up; Presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter is sought out by the media and says that he is “bummed” about the breakup; McCotter announces that he is dropping out of the Presidential race.

Incidentally, for nearly the past two decades, every time I have moved I have brought along and stuffed in the back of a new drawer a ziploc bag containing some 3.5″ floppy disks from when I was an undergraduate. The top one is labeled “G.H.M. and R.E.M.” and is a paper I spent a bunch of what-now-feels-horribly-misspent hours on, applying George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism to the observation that [now, what we would call “early”] R.E.M.’s music was more meaningful precisely because their albums didn’t include lyrics sheets and one could only occasionally make out what they were saying.